The field of the disclosure relates generally to enhanced security surrounding online payment card transactions, and more specifically to method and systems for incorporating social network data into a fraud risk assessment for payment transactions.
Fraudulent payment transactions impose significant costs on users of a payment network, including merchants, banks, and individual cardholders. Accordingly, known payment networks often employ fraud prevention systems to flag or deny potentially fraudulent payment transactions. For example, when an online merchant receives an online purchase request, many online merchants determine whether to proceed or not with the purchase request based on a fraud/risk analysis. The fraud risk analysis can involve analyzing information such as, but not limited to payment account, browser (or native) device information, shipping address, IP address, and email address. This fraud risk analysis is an effort to determine if the purchase is fraudulent or not.
If the purchaser has previously shopped at the merchant (or merchant's agent) then the fraud risk analysis becomes easier and is more likely to result in a successful outcome because the merchant has a prior relationship with the purchaser. Therefore, the merchant has information about previous transactions to apply to the information above. Not having this previous transaction information, the fraud risk analysis of the first purchase is harder for the merchant to determine if the purchase is genuine or not. Thus the first purchase has a far higher probability of being not allowed by the merchant's fraud risk analysis.
Social media networks provide a digital identity that can be used to identify an individual and provide means for connection different people together. These people usually have things in common and in a lot of cases are connected in real life as well as in the social network space. Among the common things that people have in common is spending patterns. Individually these connected people may be referred to as the individual's friends (also known as connections, contacts, and followers), and collectively as the individual's circle of friends.